X Prize Foundation to Add 3 New Ocean Competitions

The X Prize Foundation is crowdsourcing ideas for the competitions, and plans to announce all three by 2020. The organization has already awarded one ocean X Prize, for oil-spill cleanup, and it launched a second ocean challenge in September.

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Today the X Prize Foundation, which drives innovation by organizing high-stakes competitions with prizes up to $10 million, is announcing a major new commitment to ocean research. It plans to launch three ocean-oriented competitions by 2020. And these are building on previous prizes: The organization awarded a purse for a hyperefficient oil-spill-cleanup technology in 2011, and last month it announced a race to develop technology for monitoring ocean acidification. Both competitions were sponsored by philanthropist Wendy Schmidt. With these three new efforts, that makes five prizes in 10 years, and the biggest push the foundation has ever made in a single area. X Prize Foundation founder and CEO Peter Diamandis will discuss the projects in detail tonight, when he receives the 2013 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Leadership Award in New York City.

The X Prize Foundation is departing from its usual practice by crowdsourcing ideas for these ocean competitions, or Grand Challenges. (To participate, go here). The program is overseen by Paul Bunje, a marine biologist who previously headed up UCLA's Center for Climate Change Solutions. "Crowdsourcing these ideas is pretty straightforward, but it's important because we're talking about what the whole global populace needs," he says. "We have great relationships with academics, NGOs, and government bodies, but there are additional people out there with unique insights. We want to put them to work." Eventually, a number of ocean ambassadors will be chosen to help formulate the details of the competitions. Those people could come from the fishing industry, scientific community, or the wider world of innovators, entrepreneurs, and amateur problem solvers.

When it comes to ocean health, Bunje says, it's not hard to rattle off a litany of problems that need innovative solutions, including pollution, dead zones that result from fertilizer runoff, habitat destruction, ocean acidification resulting from rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Instead of tackling those problems in isolation, the goal is to create a series of competitions that together can catalyze broad changes in the way the oceans are studied, regulated, and used. "People don't really value the oceans, in a monetary sense, because we don't know enough about how to use them sustainably," Bunje says. "Fisheries are a great example. In places where we know what sustainable harvests are, fishers get behind the idea of regulation. But that starts with the data."

The X Prize Foundation first made its mark with the $10 million Ansari X Prize, which helped spark the private space industry, and two other X Prize challenges have focused on space exploration. Several X Prize winners have been recognized with Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards. That includes Elastec/American Marine, the winner of the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge.